Clause 71 - Review of DST

Part of Finance Bill – in the House of Commons at 3:45 pm on 1 July 2020.

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Photo of Kevin Hollinrake Kevin Hollinrake Conservative, Thirsk and Malton 3:45, 1 July 2020

I absolutely agree. Any businessperson starts off on the premise that they have responsibilities not just to their shareholders, but to their customers and other stakeholders.

Due to the scale of the problem and the lack of country-by-country reporting, it is difficult to establish exactly what some of these companies are making in the UK, but let us look at Google as an example. In 2018, Google turned over $137 billion and had net revenues— so a profit—of $31 billion. The whole organisation internationally works on a profit margin of about 22%. The company turned over around $10 billion in the UK in the same year, and makes about $2.2 billion of profit from UK activities each year. If we applied 19% corporation tax to that amount, we would come up with a figure of £420 million in corporation tax that Google should have paid. It actually paid £67 million that year. This is happening on a huge scale and is multiplied by many other companies.